Curator's Statement:

Animals have appeared in varying cultures, religions, mythologies, literature, art and entertainment throughout history. Feral Nature brings together a diverse range of contemporary artists to investigate “the animal” both literally and metaphorically. Through sculpture, painting, photography, works on paper and video these artists push and prod at the boundary between nature and culture as well as the assumed distance between animal and human behavior. The artists in Feral Nature look at the symbolism of the animal body, the tension between wild and domesticated, and the clash between opposites of scale, color and context. Using humor and irony, as well as critical reflections on social and gender issues these artists will cause us to look deeper at what is “animal” and consequently at our own true nature. – Margaret Meehan

Essay: Wild at Heart

In post-Enlightenment self-congratulatory humanist literature, civilization is often defined in terms of its opposite – the wild. Order is prized and associated with the human, while chaos is relegated to the animal world. Sometimes there is overlap, as in the madness that lies in the bowels of the jungle in Heart of Darkness and its subsequent film adaptation, Apocalypse Now. The jungle in Conrad’s tale is the setting for us to remember our primal origins. For Coppola, our feral nature is easily revealed once war strips away the thin veneer of civilized behavior.

Pages of ink have been spilt on the colonialist narrative implicit in Heart of Darkness and the western racism that looked at not only the African body but also the African landscape as primitive, wild and frightening. What Coppola does is reverse this to see how the westerner (the American military) can also exhibit behavior that is uncivilized, untamed and wild with rage.

A crucial scene in this film involves the ritual slaughter of an ox. We first hear the psychotically calm whisper of Marlon Brando (Kurtz) spewing logical knots. “We train young men to drop fire on people but their commanders won't allow them to write 'FUCK' on their airplanes because it's obscene.” Soon Willard (Martin Sheen) is seen fulfilling his mission to assassinate Kurtz, intercut with the brutal killing of the animal. We are left with Kurtz’s whisper, “The horror. The horror.” Humans kill. Animals kill. Which is civilized and which is wild?

“He’s an animal!” “She’s a bitch!” We often say these things to compare ourselves to something other. But in these comparisons we also separate ourselves from the truly feral and unruly.

Humans and animals are not so easily set up as opposites. Feral Nature probes the boundaries between wild and domesticated behavior, the way that our bodies function as both nature and culture. It also seeks to investigate the way that animals become stand-ins for our own fears and desires. The nature here is not merely animal but feral, with an emphasis on the untamed.

Will Rogan and Jenny Schleif both use a human body isolated in uncivilized behavior. Rogan ‘s video of his daughter playing amplifies both play and childhood and their freakish untamed qualities by using mirrors to multiply her image. Schleif dresses up in kitschy cute bunny ears, conflating little girl fantasies with the all too familiar Playboy animal of choice. Exposed in isolation she forces us into voyeurs, caught in a moment that is both intimate and primal, carrying us on a journey where a human body is transformed by pleasure.

Thomas Müller, Clayton Hurt and John Byrd use animals as metaphor. Müller looks at two qualities of animal behavior: their tendency toward the pack (vaguely resembling a more human mob) and the scale relationship between animals and humans. Hurt animates his animals to the point of anthropomorphism but emphasizes such unabashed behavior that they become animals that are like humans that are like animals. John Byrd animates his animals simultaneously emphasizing their use as specimens, trophies, and objectified cute trinkets.

Claire Cowie riffs on the metaphoric use of animals but with more attention to the precedent in storybook illustration and fairy tales. This is an adult projection of a child’s connection to animals, as if by implication, uncivilized children are somehow more connected to the animal kingdom. This was the premise of Art-Brut but Cowie emphasizes the sweetness of childhood rather than a romanticized view of their primal nature. Raychael Stine uses pop to create a similar sense of candy-coated romanticism in her approach to animals. This sense of fantasy separates them from our reality and emphasized the disconnect between human and animal psychologies.

Karen Davenport and Bradly Brown literally pan back and forth between human and animal subjects, catching each in moments of verisimilitude. Here the camera becomes voyeur, slicing these moments out of continuum and positing the possibility that an untamed subject exists in the moments between poses, between clear cultural constructions.

While Apocalypse Now may probe the more extreme dimensions of the wild, emphasizing madness and violence, many of these artists open up multiple ways of looking at animal behavior. They allow humor, playfulness, and kitsch all human projections on the animal kingdom - to be folded back onto what we consider to be the purity of untamed creatures. These artists show us that the borderland between civilization and the wild is permeable. Through interiority and absent-mindedness we sometimes shed our domesticated selves and reveal our feral nature.

– Noah Simblist